Tag: Manchester City

The FA has passed down it’s judgement on Joey Barton, and he has been suspended for a total of twelve games for his misdemeanours in the last game of the season against Manchester City. The first four games of the ban cover the sending off for violent conduct, plus an extra game ban for it being Barton’s second sending off of the season – every time a player gets sent off more than once in a season in England, they have an extra game added to their suspension for eqch subsequent dismissal. In that respect the other games are for the two incidents after referee Mike Dean produced the red card – kicking out at Sergio Aguero, and attempting to headbutt Vincent Kompany. From the outset, it appeared that there were two likely ways that the incidents would have been treated. The first was that each offence would have been treated as another act of violent conduct worthy of a sending off, and therefore would have been treated like Barton’s third and fourth red cards of the season, bringing a five game ban for the kick and a six game ban for the headbutt, meaning that Barton could feasibly have been suspended for a total of fifteen games. The second way was that because Mike Dean did not produce subsequent red cards, the kick and attempted headbutt would be...

Forty-four years ago, Manchester City broke their record transfer fee and splashed out £60,000 on Francis Lee from Bolton Wanderers. Several months later, they celebrated their first English championship for thirty-one years. At the start of this season, they broke that transfer record again and it was the man whose arrival at The City of Manchester Stadium did this, the £38m Sergio Aguero, who scored an almost inconceivable goal three minutes into stoppage-time to bring the title back to the club on an afternoon of emotional extremes which encapsulated why we love and loathe this beautiful, extraordinary, sanity-testing game. At five to three this afternoon, their job was easy. A win at home against a relegation-threatened Queens Park Rangers would be enough to do it. Anything else, and they would be reliant upon Manchester United failing to take all three points from their trip to Wearside to play Sunderland. The stage was set for an afternoon that might have failed to live up to expectations. After all, Manchester City’s home form this season has been little short of sensational and Queens Park Rangers have carried something of a haunted look about them over the last few weeks. It hardly seemed inconceivable that Manchester City could bag an early goal, close the game out and leave us wondering what all the hype had been about. This, though, is Manchester City,...

By tomorrow evening, half of Manchester – a phrase that in itself provokes so much debate that it is worth pointing out that it is being used for the purposes of simplicity alone – will be celebrating a Premier League championship victory. Either Manchester City or Manchester United will be crowned as the champions of England. That such a set of circumstances should have come about on the final day of the season is a situation that has likely caused Peter Scudamore to make some faintly obscene gurgling noises over the last couple of weeks or so, but it has also sparked a debate over the nature of Manchester City’s sudden, testosterone-fuelled rise to the summit of the game, a rise fuelled by the money of the Abu Dhabi United group. Should results go their way tomorrow afternoon – and there is little to suggest that they won’t at present, although this projection is subect to change – City will be roundly accused of having “bought” the title, but is this simplistic assessment of what would be their first championship victory in almost four and a half decades a fair one? The amount of money spent by Manchester City over the last two or three years or so is eye-watering. Of that, we can be certain. Before we starting throwing around very modern catchphrases such as “financial doping”, though,...

The hard work, the experts will tell you, has been done. Victories against Manchester United and Newcastle United have taken Manchester City to the cusp of their first English league championship in almost four and a half decades and on Sunday afternoon a win against Queens Park Rangers at the City of Manchester Stadium will be enough to return the second part of the dynasty that the club’s lavish owners have set their hearts upon since taking control of it in 2008. Yet seasoned supporters of Manchester City will be taking little for granted. This is a club that has let them down on more than one occasion in the past, and few will be celebrating too much before the final whistle blows on Sunday afternoon. Nerves will be shredded and fingernails will be ground to the point of non-existence. Manchester City, however, have been here before. Forty-four years is a long time, when the club last became the champions of England in 1968 they did so on the last day of the season. This was a title win at the end of a season that had been dominated by the north of the country, with four of the top five clubs – Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool and Everton – coming from the north-west, with the other being Leeds United. Yet of these four clubs, Manchester City were...

If the Premier League excels at any one thing, then that thing must be spectacle of the type that we saw at the City of Manchester Stadium last night. The significance of this meeting between Manchester City and Manchester United – both literal and symbolic – could not have been lost upon anybody that cast so much as a cursory glance in the direction of the league table, and in the build up to the match the press began to run out of superlatives regarding its significance. It was a sense of expectation that the two sides could never hope to live up to, but Manchester City and Manchester United still contrived to offer up ninety minutes of the sort of tension and high drama that only the end of the domestic football season seems capable of offering. While the mathematics of evening were simple enough for a child to understand – City had to win to go back to the top of the table with two games left to play; anything else would most likely mean a twentieth league championship going to Old Trafford – the permutations for the rest of the season remain somewhat more opaque. Vincent Kompany’s goal thirty seconds into stoppage time at the end of the first half meant that Roberto Mancini achieved his goal for the evening, but this time around even hitting the top of the...